keekerdc2021-11-08T00:00:00+00:00Chris Schetterme@keekerdc.comNobody wants your product.2019-05-29T00:00:00+00:00https://keekerdc.com/blog/nobody-wants-your-product./<p>Your customers, whether they be average people, or especially other businesses, would rather have nothing to do with you.</p>
<p>They don't actually want to have your product. They don't want to buy it, it's money they'd rather have for other things, like their own bottom line, or, I dunno, food.</p>
<p>They don't want to spend time learning how to use your product, that's time better spent on their own business, or their Game of Thrones fan-fiction rewrite of the final season.</p>
<p>They don't want the hassle of actually using it, <em>at all</em>, let alone to be "living in it" as some expect. The cost of your product to a client is not just what you invoice, it's also the time they spend mucking about with your stupid app. And the time they spend mucking about with you when it doesn't work.</p>
<p>What's wanted is the <em>outcome</em> your product provides or enables, your service is a means to that end. They pay for the result your product enables, whether that be time saved, or effort saved, or some information or materials or capability they can't get through some other means. I think teams tend to begin failing at which point the team considers the set of features that comprise the product, and the outcome produced, to be interchangeable.</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a particularly new or original thought. The notion of 'outcome-driven innovation' or 'jobs-to-be-done' product management has been around since the turn of the millennium, despite it not getting terribly much traction. But I'm using it as the starting point for this reboot of my blog, because I've found this concept describes perfectly the inflection point in the mentality between product teams I've seen succeed, and those that struggle and fail.</p>
<p>Stacks and stacks have been written on the topic of effective product management that focus on how to wrangle engineers to most efficiently do your bidding, or on estimating and prioritizing and building roadmaps, or on how to work with designers, or how to get everyone into an 'agile' workflow. All of that stuff is made easier or immediately falls into place when the outcome to be produced for your customer is clearly defined and is continually foundational to the decision making process around a product's development.</p>
<p>So much emphasis has been put on that initial dash to a 'minimally viable product' that it's almost as though nobody is really sure of what to do once a team has delivered that initial bundle of features. It's laughably easy to run through those first few 'sprints' towards an MVP without defining what the outcomes for customers are supposed to be.</p>
<p>So you've shipped v1 and done some marketing and you have some clients. Great! Now what? How about an ambitious goal, like 5x revenue before year's end? How about a sessions per user per day KPI? Time to knuckle down and start burning through that backlog, right? What's next on that roadmap you put together months ago? What's the low hanging fruit? Sales says this important client wants [some nebulous thing] that would really make them happy.</p>
<p>Whoops, nope, you've already derailed. And the worst bit about it is that it'll take months, quarters, maybe even a year before it's clear that the train left the tracks.</p>
<p>What are the customer outcomes we aim to deliver or enable?</p>
<p>How far are we from delivering those outcomes?</p>
<p>How does this proposed set of work get us closer to delivering an outcome perfectly?</p>
<p>These are the questions that winning teams ask themselves every week. Because your customers would rather have nothing to do with you.</p>
Cut me some slack.2019-07-14T00:00:00+00:00https://keekerdc.com/blog/cut-me-some-slack./<p>An entire cottage industry has sprung up around hot takes on why Slack is ruining everyone's companies, businesses, and lives - especially during the run-up to its reasonably successful listing on the NYSE. A perfunctory search produced the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/1/18511575/productivity-slack-google-microsoft-facebook">The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work</a> (Vox, May 2019)</li>
<li><a href="https://mashable.com/2017/05/12/slack-is-ruining-your-life/">Face it: Slack is ruining your life</a> (Mashable, May 2017)</li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/@chrisjbatts/actually-slack-really-sucks-625802f1420a">Actually, Slack really sucks</a> (Medium, 2016)</li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/@ShinobiSystems/why-slack-is-bad-for-teamwork-and-why-you-should-never-try-it-6fe2c2f15470">Why Slack is bad for teamwork and Why you should never try it</a> (Medium, July 2018)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40433793/my-company-tried-slack-for-two-years-this-is-whywe-quit">My Company Tried Slack For Two Years. This Is Why We Quit.</a> (Fast Company, June 2017)</li>
<li><a href="https://qz.com/work/1363534/what-happened-when-we-took-a-week-off-of-slack/">What happened when we took a week off of Slack</a> (Quartz, August 2018)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.userlike.com/en/blog/slack-productivity">How Slack is Silently Killing Your Productivity</a> (Userlike, October 2018)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>And that's just from the first two pages of results. I can't help but feel like this is all really familiar...as though the business press and productivity blogosphere and every two-bit engineer had some other punching bag before Slack came along, some other menace that was sapping your company's mojo through constant interruption and running roughshod over the boundaries between work and leisure.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/opinion/end-the-tyranny-of-24-7-email.html">End the Tyranny of 24/7 Email</a> (The New York Times, August 2014)</li>
<li><a href="https://hbr.org/2012/02/stop-email-overload-1">Stop Email Overload</a> (Harvard Business Review, February 2012)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2013/10/15/5-ways-email-makes-your-employees-miserable/#776633fb1caa">5 Ways Email Makes Your Employees Miserable</a> (Forbes, October 2013)</li>
<li><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tech-stress-emails-handle-day/story?id=11201183">How Many Emails Can You Handle a Day?</a> (ABC News, July 2010)</li>
<li><a href="https://lifehacker.com/top-10-tricks-for-dealing-with-email-overload-5850125">Top 10 Tricks for Dealing with Email Overload</a> (Lifehacker, October 2011)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/manage-inbox-email-overload_n_3921823">You're Spending Way Too Much Time Checking Your Email. Here's What To Do</a> (Huffington Post, September 2013)</li>
<li><a href="https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-cost-of-continuously-checking-email">The Cost of Continuously Checking Email</a> (Harvard Business Review, July 2014)</li>
<li><a href="https://redbooth.com/blog/tame-the-email-beast-minimize-your-email-inbox-to-maximize-your-productivity">Tame the Email Beast: Minimize Your Email Inbox to Maximize Your Productivity</a> (Redbooth, March 2014)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Oh right, for ten years prior, <em>email</em> was every armchair business performance consultant's favorite bogeyman.</p>
<p>It breaks your concentration and destroys your ability to 'reach flow' through beeps and chirps and notification badges. Whether by fear of missing something important or by giving way to the compulsion to constantly pull-to-refresh our various feeds of information like the slot machine junkies we are, it encroaches on time that should be without work. It encourages disjointed conversations, and decisions taken without input or consideration from all relevant parties. It impairs an organization's collective memory as messages get buried in inboxes and archives, and then ultimately lost to retention policies. Am I talking about email or Slack?</p>
<p>Ultimately - whether it be Teams, or Hangouts, or Zoom, or Hipchat, or Campfire, or email, or text messages, or phone calls, or whatever - it seems like we're quite literally shooting the messenger. Slack just has the highest profile of the group presently, and so now it's taking all the heat. These things facilitate messages. While each may have a slightly different take on precisely how messages are stored, organized, delivered, and notified about; they are the medium, and not the message.</p>
<p>So with all that said, here are the two real underlying problems that communication tools, Slack chief among them, are taking all the flak for:</p>
<h4 id="1.-your-company-culture-sucks.">1. Your company culture sucks.</h4>
<p>Your manager pings you at all hours and expects a response within a minute regardless of regular business hours. Your teammates often follow suit.</p>
<p>People on other teams within your company don't respect your established protocols for requesting work from your team, opting to message you directly instead.</p>
<p>You sat in an hour-long meeting completely unprepared for the discussion because the context was buried several days back in a thread you missed, or in the logs of a busy channel.</p>
<p>A bunch of your efforts were wasted because of a decision taken in a channel that you weren't in.</p>
<p>Slack very well may have been the venue in which all of these wrongs took place. That doesn't mean Slack is to blame. It doesn't enable these behaviors above and beyond being a channel for communication.</p>
<p>Slack is not to blame for your relationship with your management being lopsided. Slack is not to blame when your coworkers ignore your boundaries. Slack is not to blame for your teammates' inability to set agendas and run meetings. Slack is not to blame for lack of alignment behind goals and responsibilities in your organization.</p>
<p>If your company's culture sucks, it's not Slack's fault, and it's not Slack's responsibility to fix it. Shitty company culture, like the sewage that it is, will flow through the path of least resistance. Bad teammates will find a way to mess up your day regardless of the tool that enables them to do it, because they're bad teammates. If they didn't have Slack to do it, they'd do it over email, or over the phone, or by walking over to your desk and interrupting you, or some combination thereof.</p>
<h4 id="2.-you-don't-think-communicating-with-your-colleagues-counts-as-part-of-your-job%2C-and-you're-wrong.">2. You don't think communicating with your colleagues counts as part of your job, and you're wrong.</h4>
<p>If you happen to work solo on a product that is completely automated and requires no interaction or support for your customers: first, congratulations, but the rest of this post is not for you. Surf on.</p>
<p>Great, now for those of you still with me - to be clear that is <em>all</em> of you - accept the fact that you will get interrupted. That's a part of working on a product with other people in the service of actual customers. If you're not getting interrupted at least some of the time then your relationship with the rest of your coworkers is irreparably damaged, or you have no customers, either of which is an unsustainable situation.</p>
<p>Taking agency over the conditions under which you'll be interrupted is absolutely something you should do. The digital team at NPR had (still has maybe?) a 'diver down' protocol where you'd throw a sheet of paper with the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=diver+down+flag&oq=diver+down+flag&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1965j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">scuba flag</a> on it over the side of your cubicle, throw headphones on, close out IM (at the time, actual AIM) and email, and that was a mutually respected line that would not be crossed before lunchtime or quitting time.</p>
<p>But regardless of your title and role, whether you work in a company of two or two thousand, communicating with your colleagues in a timely and regular manner <em>is fucking table stakes for being a good colleague</em>. If that happens in person, fine. If that happens over email, fine. If that happens over Slack, fine.</p>
<p>What's not fine is expecting your level of interaction with others in your company to be negligible. What's not fine is holding contempt for others in your company who need your input and cooperation in order to do their job. It does not matter if your job title is Senior Whatever Engineer and you got your job by successfully white-boarding a fizzbuzz in brainfuck, it's still not fine to think that tapping away in your editor of choice is 100% your job, and that everything else including communication isn't.</p>
<p>Those are your problems to solve, and Slack didn't create them.</p>
the ESPN of esports.2020-11-16T12:00:00+00:00https://keekerdc.com/blog/the-espn-of-esports./<p>Media outlets everywhere are munching shit in 2020, regardless of stature or subject matter. ESPN is not special, and not immune, and is eliminating 10% of its staff. This included its entire esports department, whose operations are already shut down.</p>
<p>It sucks. The team there was good, the reporting was solid; it was an important part of the media landscape around esports. When ESPN opened a dedicated esports vertical several years ago, it was thought to be the beginning of increasing attention given to esports by The Worldwide Leader, reflective of what the esports industry saw as an inevitable shift over time in the appetite for sports content globally.</p>
<p>The move to wind down the entire department four years after starting is a firm rebuke to such an optimistic vision, especially since the insider scuttlebutt suggests this round of cuts was done to make room for expanded NFL football coverage when (if?) we get to a post-COVID return to normalcy.</p>
<p>So...who else can take up the title if ESPN couldn't, or wouldn't, be the "ESPN of esports?"</p>
<p>Dear reader, <em><strong>nobody should even bother trying</strong></em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>To answer, we have to pull apart ESPN's overall content production model, which they rode from a humble existence as an early experiment in satellite-distributed television, broadcasting from a studio without running water built on top of a dump, to being a behemoth synonymous with the coverage of sports.</p>
<p>It's an approach that has not pivoted in the slightest since their first minute on-air, only added to with the advent of the internet. The components are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Gobs of actual sportsball gameplay aired in its unedited entirety, mostly live but also recorded</li>
<li><em>SportsCenter</em>, a regularly produced headline news and highlights show</li>
<li>"Talking heads" opinion/commentary programs and content</li>
<li>comprehensive scores, stats, and (relatively) independent business news reporting online</li>
</ul>
<p>ESPN's first broadcast in 1979 was the debut of <em>SportsCenter</em>. It was followed by play-by-play coverage of the championship series in men's professional slow-pitch softball, between the Kentucky Bourbons and the Milwaukee Schlitz. Haha yea no, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/sports/espn-game-1-1979-eagles-netflix-nfl-robert-irvine-20190910.html">I didn't make that up</a>. This was more or less the programming lineup for the first decade of ESPN, though over time their portfolio of exclusive league broadcasting rights was significantly expanded and upgraded. Obviously.</p>
<p>The last two components listed above began joining the party ten years later. <em>Outside the Lines</em> premiered in 1990, featuring the venerable Bob Ley as host, as the first significant foray into reporting that dug deeper than the quick hits of <em>SportsCenter</em>. It was joined by <em>Pardon the Interruption</em> and <em>Around the Horn</em> in the early 2000s to get a piece of the talking head action that had been honed by regional sports talk radio.</p>
<p>ESPN's web presence started as a subdomain off of SportsZone<span>.com</span> in 1995 – a strange situation that would continue under Disney's go<span>.com</span> portal domain until 2016 when it finally landed without redirects at espn<span>.com</span>. Domain weirdness aside, it provided a place where content normally relegated to SportsCenter's production cycle could be produced and published 24/7, without the rigidity of a TV block schedule limiting the breadth or granular detail of the reporting. Every last score, stat, and whispered transfer rumor could be pored over anytime, day or night.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I wanted to briefly walk through this timeline of growth because ESPN owes a lot to a confluence of favorable conditions: the mass media era of the 80s and 90s, the fact that "fans of sports in general" exist, and just being first to try the pie-in-the-sky idea of a channel that airs nothing but sports. They were able to cement their dominance in a time where there literally was not enough spectrum bandwidth to allow for serious competition, and sports leagues had a pre-internet distribution problem that directly benefited ESPN.</p>
<p>The only way to get your product as a sports league into homes everywhere was to work with television networks, first among them being the ABC/ESPN empire. Entering the 2000s, they were able to build and reinforce interest in original content other than SportsCenter, and to drive habitual use of their web properties, by continually marketing these things to a captive audience who had to turn to ESPN to see marquee regular season matches in practically every big professional league.</p>
<p>I also highlight this because in any content model, not all components are created equal. There are leading actors, and supporting; meat, and potatoes. In ESPN's model, the stuff that came later – the editorial claptrap, the comprehensive reporting of scores and highlights with the cadence and quasi-serious tone of nightly news broadcasts, the massive website that had something new every half hour – none of those are the 'killer app'. They're potatoes. Though SportsCenter is obviously important as habitual appointment viewing, it's not really the main event either.</p>
<p>The reason why people put up with cable bundle fees, or pony up directly for ESPN's streaming options, is the real-time coverage of the sporting events themselves. That content is irreplaceable, and the raw materials can't be created by ESPN itself. The rest can be easily replicated and commodified, and just as easily ignored by the target audience.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When the phrase "the ESPN of esports" is bandied about, it's meant as shorthand for the last three parts of my ingredient list above: the vision of a well-staffed newsroom supporting a sprawling website, and a flagship pan-esports overview show that can command audiences of a million people each night. But if you accept my narrative about how the "ESPN of ball sports" was built, then you understand why this vision for the esports version is incomplete, and fatally flawed. It's hard to imagine how ESPN manages to build their newsroom without the foundational portfolio of exclusive rights to air marquee events, and the constraints of pre-internet television working in their favor to concentrate attention.</p>
<p>The confluence of favorable conditions that allowed ESPN to grow aren't around to help those who want to build a new ESPN around esports today.</p>
<p>We got a pretty clean demonstration of that fact earlier this year. The total shutdown of sports by COVID left ESPN digging deep into their vault of content. They were airing silly dive contests and marble races. Adpoting the ficticious '<em>ESPN 8: the Ocho</em>' monicker for a while provided a bit of levity; but really it was just bleak, depressing shit. Since some parts of the esports scene were able to continue operating, it setup a unique opportunity for ESPN to put this whole esports thing it had been dabbling in to a true test, and solve a few unknowns in their approach and timeline around esports.</p>
<p>With absolutely no ball sports being played, they could try snapping up the rights to the biggest esports content still being produced, and see if (a) this much ballyhooed esports audience would show up for esports on linear tv, and/or if (b) their crusty core audience of "fans of sports in general" who loudly insist that "esports aren't sports" would shut the fuck up for an hour or two and watch some fresh unscripted competitive content, during the largest drought for sports since the Second World War, despite hating the whole concept.</p>
<p>ESPN picked up the rights to League of Legends' spring split finals in mid-April. It wasn't the first time ESPN aired an esports competition live, but I think it's probably one of the last. Despite "blasting" a previous viewership record <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/29097271/lec-spring-split-reaches-record-number-viewers">according to ESPN itself</a>, it drew a peak audience of about 800,000 – less than the average pull for <em>SportsCenter</em> in the before times. There are 25% more people playing Counter-Strike at the moment I'm writing this. It wasn't a resounding no to these questions of audience crossover, but it wasn't a resounding yes either; and if I'm a business dick for the Walt Disney Company that's exactly the sort of ambiguous signal I need to identify esports as fat to be trimmed when needs must.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Perhaps it's also a signal that there isn't much of a symbiosis to be found between esports competitions and large monolithic media companies. Even the relationship between traditional professional sports leagues and networks like ESPN is arguably an unnatural one; if it were at all possible, leagues would much rather have preserved a direct relationship with their fanbase and sold them content directly. They had no choice but to accept television networks as a middleman, taking one lump sum for the broadcast rights as a proxy for thousands of individual subscriptions. Now that the overall costs and complexities of video content production are much smaller, and you can easily stream video to just about everyone in the developed world, the symbiosis is breaking down in ball sports – every league now has their own dot-tv app and a 24/7 network on cable. It's a matter of when ESPN's foundation crumbles, not if.</p>
<p>So it makes even less sense to try with esports, in the internet era, when the scene has always been able to reach its audience directly, <em>over the internet</em>. Television networks don't bring a larger "mainstream" audience to esports, no matter how many times the industry convinces itself (read: gets paid to think) that it's a good idea to give it a shot. So I don't think this is just a matter of ESPN diving into an <em>idea ahead of its time</em>, or just not getting it right. Esports leagues have no need for a centralized proxy to reach "fans of esports in general" who by and large don't exist. And without that need for a centralized proxy, you don't have the thing that binds it all together; you can't build ESPN.</p>
<p>What does that mean for the next decade in esports? I think it means that some of the roles that people hoped ESPN might play will be handled by smaller independent ventures, who are better positioned to do those things anyhow, and examples of which already exist. Business and investigative reporting is better done by entities not trying to garner favorable deals for broadcast rights from the leagues they may need to report unfavorable things about. The leagues around individual esports can focus on strengthening the relationship with their fanbase, instead of fretting about how they might be received by a disinterested mass-media audience; and they're best positioned to deliver stuff like scores and highlights and surface-level reporting. Talking heads can talk on twitter.</p>
<p>So while I certainly hope everyone coming out from ESPN lands on their feet, I think we'll be just fine without involvement from Bristol, and it's my hope we stop seeking it.</p>
How to kill a unicorn from the inside.2021-11-08T00:00:00+00:00https://keekerdc.com/blog/how-to-kill-a-unicorn-from-the-inside./<p><em>All characters and events in this post, even those that took inspiration from things like the company profiled in links below, are entirely fictional. Any similarity to things that happened or are happening at actual companies, living or dead, is purely coincidental; though not surprising.</em></p>
<p><img src="https://keekerdc.com/static/img/posts/unicorn/wheelofdomination.png" alt="This is a Six Sigma Wheel of Domination."></p>
<p>So you've just taken in a Series C or D or E or K round that has pushed your company's valuation, in the opinion of a small group of people, past the $1,000,000,000 mark! Congratulations are in order. I trust you've already <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2011/11/01/50-great-places-to-work-in-washington/">ordered the ballpit</a> for installation in one of your new offices; get on that if you haven't! The supply chain is a mess.</p>
<p>Anywho, here's how you go about ensuring your newly minted unicorn will eat the pavement in a few years time, following a playbook I was able to assemble through observation from the inside of a company that was – at the peak – <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/technology/livingsocial-once-a-unicorn-is-losing-its-magic.html">pulling in millions and growing every week while accelerating towards the ground</a>.</p>
<h3 id="1.-hire-faster-than-your-company-can-culturally-absorb">1. Hire faster than your company can culturally absorb</h3>
<p>The whole point of VC is to launch an artificially large company into orbit without the revenue that would keep it in orbit, and pray the revenue arrives before gravity does. Closing a funding round comes with an expectation that the whole investment will get deployed in the subsequent 18 months, give or take.</p>
<p>One of the best ways to have a Bad Time as a founder of a VC-backed company is to close a round and then <em>not</em> follow this rule. You're to put their money where your mouth was when you raised the round, and you do not take your sweet time about it.</p>
<p>So you've taken a growth round in the $50M or more range! Raising a small army of account executives and sales associates is a default move; but experienced engineers and seasoned senior managers across disciplines like marketing and business development make deep dents in that slug of cash.</p>
<p>Targeting splashy industry insider hires can generate lots of buzz within the industry sphere you're trying to <em>disrupt</em>, or within the developer communities around the tech stack you use. Your still wildly unprofitable venture will gain a new veneer of legitimacy, and you'll see steady interest for open positions with the hot startup on the block, for a time.</p>
<p>A job at your company gets pitched by your recruiters like a high-end consumer experience in itself, with lots of unique quirks and perks. When that all inevitably wears thin and the pace starts to stall, offer excessive bonuses for employee referrals, and sometimes for the new hires themselves, to keep those weekly orientation tracks well attended.</p>
<p>Any company culture regardless of strength is made completely irrelevant under these dynamics. Floods of new employees bring habits and preferences and ways of working and interacting from their previous experiences, and your carefully cultivated core principles are empty platitudes if the newbies aren't consistently outnumbered by your true believers in their day-to-day work.</p>
<h3 id="2.-expand-your-footprint-and-go-on-a-ravenous-acquisition-spree-just-because-you-can">2. Expand your footprint and go on a ravenous acquisition spree just because you can</h3>
<p>With the newfound momentum and attention and expectations comes an entirely new category of problems for the founders and C-suite to grapple with; this is where they detach from the core product and refocus their priorities around building a <em>company</em> that will hopefully IPO soon. This is a refreshing and exciting change of pace from being down in the trenches. You now have a <em>Six Sigma Wheel of Domination</em> to fill. It's about building geographic lists of markets to open operations in, building lists of teams to pile new hires into, and building lists of bankers and insitutional investors to start plying.</p>
<p>So if hiring a buttload of new people very quickly seems good, doing just that in a bunch of new and far flung <em>places</em> is one better. Even if you mandate a remote-first cultural posture and don't strictly require people to commute in, organizing teams around local offices ends up being the easiest route to keeping an acceptable level of legibility on your workforce.</p>
<p>Form a dedicated team for establishing new offices and make sure they stay busy. The process of opening satelite offices – signing leases, doing interior design and buildout, and purchasing furniture – is an efficient means of chewing through capital, and ribbon cuttings make for great social media posts. Your 'Contact Us' page gets more impressive with each new address and plus-something phone number that you get to add. Projecting an 'international megacorp' vibe is the main goal here.</p>
<p>If you want to tackle the side quest of generating intractable internal fragmentation and tribalism, it's hard to improve on the strategy of opening many satellite offices in parallel. Don't relocate existing management staff to run them; hire fresh management along with the staff to guarantee that these outposts will be disconnected from the core, left to sort out their own particular ethos. Here you'll find primed engines for discontent and cynicism when the good times stop rolling, or when your priorities and roadmaps shift.</p>
<p>But if you do want to improve on that strategy, the best option is to go buy some other tangentally related companies. It's a turnkey way to get everything mentioned above, but with <em>feeling</em>. If incorporating new individual employees into a company culture is a disruptive task, absorbing another previously independent and fully formed culture is like a large asteroid slamming into a planet.</p>
<p>With each acqusition, you suddenly have a bushel or two of new employees who find themselves with a company they didn't interview for, and a smattering of senior management folks who find themselves several rungs down the org chart from where they were previously, and a wad of disconnected software on its own stack with its own highly territorial engineering team attached.</p>
<p>Again, with the growth-stage rounds, the VC model practically demands you do this to some degree. But to maximize the effect, make such an acquisition roughly once a quarter. Buying ARR while being publicly handwavey about increases in bookings makes it easy to construct a facade of parabolic growth with growing momentum, even if the wave of buzz-driven bookings has already crested.</p>
<p>Kick your marketing team into overdrive presenting your core business and new acquisitions immediately as a fully integrated and 'synergistic' whole, and get the business press to echo that message uncritically; when that's quite plainly impossible to achieve in less than six months at the bare minimum on a technical, operational, or cultural level.</p>
<h3 id="3.-launch-speculative-new-products-that-are-adjacent-additions-and-not-core-multipliers">3. Launch speculative new products that are adjacent additions and not core multipliers</h3>
<p>You're well into your hiring blitz and you need to slot all these people into meaningful work that will advance the company. Chances are, a good bit of the stuff you had in mind when you pitched and closed the round is no longer relevant; the state of the industry and your understanding of product hypotheses doesn't stand still for half a year while you're busy attracting talent and staffing up. Much of the shift in priorities will result from early jostling between some of the new hires you bring in, with their fresh (or stale, as the case may be) perspectives.</p>
<p>Good thing there's all these new people around to sort that out for themselves, while you're consumed with your <em>Wheel of Domination</em>. Your thriving new middle management layer has the perfect opportunity to go about building their fiefdoms.</p>
<p>Some teams were assembled with specific products in mind that got those new hires interested in joining – make sure some of those projects get rug-pulled, pushing those teams immediately into low morale. The product org has several new cross-functional engineering teams blinking at them, expecting to work in parallel, but they haven't sorted out how to map those teams onto the dependency-laden roadmap they charted a year or so ago. Don't forget about all those acquisitions you made; they all know they won't sit atop the throne, but that doesn't mean they're about to give up their land easily.</p>
<p>You may begin learning that there was a lot less growth left in your core offering than you thought when you hired all those people. When it starts to dawn on people that meaningful work is scarce despite the explosion in head count, everyone will scramble to find — or more likely, invent — things to build that they predict will be 'load bearing' in the name of self preservation.</p>
<p>The main output from engineering will become products for their colleagues at the company to use in their engineering, things which are obviously over-engineered but justified as 'future-proof' in response to the whole international megacorp vibe you cultivated above. The core product experience languishes because that's the old boring 'legacy' stuff that nobody wants to work on, despite generating millions in revenue.</p>
<p>Take whatever transigent issue is the hot topic in your industry from month to month, and pull your product org into reacting to that. Describe it as 'low hanging fruit.' The new things that get launched to customers from these spasms don't carry your core offering forward, but instead are what product thought could be marketed to your existing customer base. They can only be pitched as "and also we do..." not "and then you can...", muddling your sales process as your menu expands.</p>
<p>The standard motions around product launches are adhered to, press releases are pressed and gushing LinkedIn posts are posted. Analysts that produce quadrants gobble it up and continue to stick you towards the upper right. Most of these new things don't work particularly well, but some kinda do.</p>
<p>Every half year or so, re-define your mission statement and target customer around the kinda working things, and hold all-hands to rally your entire company around them as the new company-making (or company-saving) initiatives. When they ultimately don't show the post-launch torque that your core business did back in the seed round days, crater your credibility with the rank and file by remaining a steadfast adherent to the principle of letting things fail fast, and shuting them down.</p>
<h3 id="4.-cultivate-a-belief-that-your-model-is-profitable-with-scale-while-your-core-unit-is-not">4. Cultivate a belief that your model is profitable with scale while your core unit is not</h3>
<p>This last page of the playbook is run at all stages during this process, but I mention it last because this is the gravitational pull that ultimately brings the whole thing crashing down. So many startups <em>believe</em> that they have a profitable unit, and they can make a slide outlining what appears to indeed be a profitable unit; but it's that way because the business is at an early stage, and you can get away with the big honking asterisk that you're only considering gross profit before accounting for paying people.</p>
<p>You have an idea of how much of your employees' time ought to go into your unit at full maturity, but you're far from that point, and it's just a guess. Being involved with the company, however, requires faith that your hunch is correct, the unit really does become profitable with more customers, everything works out, the revenue arrives before gravity does.</p>
<p>And if you've gotten to this point in the post you should understand that everything prior was about keeping busy making that asterisk really really big. You can ignore it for a time, you can spend five dollars to make three, and keep doing that over and over, in rapidly increasing numbers, so long as you can raise the next round. Everyone inside has bought into that veneer of legitimacy, though; that it's unthinkable that a company with such a high-caliber roster and a <em>great</em> culture and a ten-figure valuation could just ... not be viable at that size.</p>
<p>It's this cultural buy-in around the invincibility of the company that allows everyone to simply not ask concrete questions about where the business actually needs to scale up to in order to support your headcount without a loot drop every year, or not feel the need to challenge all the thrashing you're doing from a product standpoint. That ARR tabulation that you multiply by twenty to justify that eye-popping valuation starts to feel a bit smaller when you realize your rapidly maturing core business model has to still double or triple in order to support just the people you've already hired.</p>
<p>Real grown up businesses in the SMB category today need roughly $1M in annual revenue per ten employees to be sustainable; to retain talent in tech ventures with proportionally more people in expensive disciplines, that ratio is more like $1M per five, or even three employees. So if you're aggressively scaling headcount towards 1000 or more, you're gonna need somewhere in the neighborhood of $250M in ARR to be viable.</p>
<p>Startups are magic in this way, these rules just don't apply to them, until suddenly they do.</p>
<p>That next round, and at this rate you <em>need</em> that next round, becomes significantly more difficult to raise. There's no one reason. A lot of internal factors, sure, we outlined a bunch of stuff above. But maybe those recession rumors last year became somewhat of a reality this year and the market is just that much tighter also. Perhaps your existing investors can't or won't participate in another round. Maybe SoftBank finally ran out of cash. But doing anything other than raising a larger round at a higher valuation to goose more growth will make it immediately apparent that things are about to get tough.</p>
<p>Some of those flashy hires you made a year or two ago start to pack their things. The farewell posts are glowing, thanks all around, can't wait to see what great things the team will do, etc, etc.</p>
<p>Then comes the hiring freeze. The orientations aren't regularly scheduled on Mondays anymore.</p>
<p>Then comes the reorg, to better align your team structure with customer needs, or something like that.</p>
<p>Gravity arrives.</p>